The World of Lore

by Aaron Mahnke

  And the seizures stopped. The young woman managed to tell all the adults in the room—her parents, Dr. Stevens, and the neighbor who had brought the spiritualist to the Vennum home—that evil spirits wanted to control her. She was afraid, and she wanted help. Dr. Stevens suggested that perhaps she should find a good spirit instead. Lurancy nodded, then closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, she smiled. It was as if all the pain and trauma were gone and Lurancy had become whole again. Except she hadn’t. Instead, she turned her gaze toward the neighbor standing toward the corner of the room, a look of intense recognition on her face.

  “Father?” she said, and then added, “It’s me. Mary Roff.”

  …QUITE CONTRARY

  Mr. and Mrs. Roff were understandably full of mixed emotions. They’d spent the past twelve years getting over the loss of their daughter. Mr. Roff had even gone to see a medium more than once, hoping for answers or at least closure. In one instance, the medium handed him a note, claiming it had been communicated to her by his dead daughter.

  There was a lot of guilt there, obviously; they’d left their daughter alone for three whole days, after all, and when they’d returned from their trip, she was dead. They’d spent years getting over all of that. Mary had been a joy and a challenge and a blessing all at the same time, but for more than a decade she’d been gone from their life.

  Until now.

  Mr. Roff went home that afternoon and told his wife what had happened. At the same time, Dr. Stevens continued to ask Lurancy questions to get to the root of her morbid role-playing. But every answer just confused the spiritualist more. This young woman was no longer Lurancy Vennum. She was Mary Roff.

  And Mary, it seems, wanted to go home. She didn’t recognize anyone in the Vennum household at all. They were strangers to her. She wanted to return to the home she knew and loved. So she asked the Vennums if she could go live with her parents at their house, and kept repeating this request for days. Finally, after nearly a week, the Vennums relented, and they escorted their daughter out of the house, down the street, and up to the front door of the Roffs’ house.

  There she immediately fell into a comfortable routine. She used nicknames for her parents and siblings that no one but Mary Roff would have known. She recognized family friends and would mention others from out of town that the Roffs knew, people who had never visited Watseka in all the years the Vennums had lived there. There was simply no way for anyone other than Mary Roff to know these things.

  When she did see the Vennums, she treated them as if they were just some nice family she’d only recently met. She was polite to them, sure, but it never evolved into anything more. But Mary knew of Lurancy. In fact, she claimed to understand better than anyone else what was really going on with her. It was just a difficult story to believe.

  Mary said that Lurancy was sick. Her seizures were a symptom of that illness. But Mary had gone through all of that in her own lifetime, and she knew how to help. So Lurancy, at least according to Mary, was in Heaven “getting better.” And when she’d recovered, Mary would leave and allow the young woman back into her own body.

  Look, I get the skepticism. I’m right there with you. This is pretty bizarre stuff, no doubt about it. And these people were obviously primed for this story, too. Spiritualism was hot in 1878. The amazing Fox sisters were three decades deep into their career as world-famous mediums, traveling around performing séances for sellout audiences. It would be another ten years before their act was exposed as a fraud. To the Vennums and the Roffs, and especially to Dr. Stevens, spiritual things were real and possible and undeniable.

  To our modern minds, though, there’s a lot to question. Lurancy had to have known her neighbors prior to that day. She’d most likely heard the tragic story of Mary Roff, if not from their own mouths then from others in town. Surely at some point in her childhood someone looked at her and said, “Oh, you live next door to the Roffs.” It’s not a story you forget.

  But there were things that are harder to dismiss. Being able to name out-of-town friends was one of them, but the woman claiming to be Mary Roff could do a lot more than that. She had dozens of conversations with old friends—people who had known Mary well before her death—and in each of those chats she mentioned details or events that no one other than her could know.

  One day, Mary walked into the Roffs’ sitting room and pointed to a velvet headdress sitting on a table. Mrs. Roff had pulled it out of Mary’s things and left it for the young woman to discover. When Mary saw it, she lit up and described how she had worn it when her hair was short. Mrs. Roff nodded in disbelief.

  Another time, Mary approached Mr. Roff and told him that she had sent him a note once, through a medium he’d gone to see. She told him the date, and he confirmed it with others. How she knew it, though, was a mystery—unless, of course, she really was Mary, back from the dead.

  All of this went on for over fifteen weeks. There were periods here and there when Mary seemed to disappear and Lurancy would return to her body. But these were brief moments, and Lurancy never seemed to be fully there. She was confused, especially by her surroundings in the Roff house, and she asked to be taken home. But before anything could be done, Mary would return.

  On May 7, Mary announced to the Roffs that Lurancy was ready to return for good. There were more brief switches between the two spirits for another two weeks, and then it was over. On May 21, Mary stood in the parlor of the Roff home and said tearful goodbyes to her family. Then one of the Roff daughters took her by the arm and escorted her down the sidewalk to the Vennums’ house. They chatted as they walked, with Mary discussing family matters and giving life advice to the other woman. And then they arrived.

  Mary mounted the steps alone and knocked on the front door. When the Vennums opened it, Mary had vanished. Lurancy was in full control of her own body again, awake and aware. She said she felt as if she’d been dreaming, and then embraced her parents. They wept for joy and welcomed her home.

  For as long as she lived, she never had another seizure.

  VISITATIONS

  This is one of those events that are difficult to accept. I fully admit that. Many people believe Lurancy Vennum made the whole thing up. It was a cry for attention, or a youthful prank, or maybe even a stunt put on by both families.

  Others, though, think it’s possible that she suffered from some form of psychosis, which ultimately manifested itself as schizophrenia. They believe that, had the Roffs not taken her in and given the girl time to recover, the Vennums eventually might have had to send her to a mental asylum, which—in the 1870s—was a one-way ticket to suffering and possible death. According to those who subscribe to this theory, it was the generosity and open-mindedness of her neighbors that saved her.

  But too many questions are left on the table for us to sort through. How did symptoms as dramatic and serious as powerful seizures simply vanish after just fifteen weeks? How did she know things about the Roffs that no one else could have known? There was even a moment during the ordeal when Lurancy, claiming to be Mary, told Dr. Stevens that she’d seen his deceased daughter in heaven, and described a cross-shaped scar on his daughter’s cheek. Dr. Stevens, amazed, confirmed that the scar was from surgery she’d undergone to stop an infection.

  Whatever we end up believing today, back then Lurancy’s parents were convinced. They said that their daughter had returned to their home “more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than before.” She’d grown up somehow. And she was physically restored. No more seizures, no more random trances. It was all gone.

  For a couple of years, though, Lurancy tried her hand at being a medium. Maybe the Roffs talked her into it, or maybe she wanted to see if she could still do the things that she’d become famous for.

  Four years later, she married a farmer named George Binning. George, it seems, had no interest in spiritualism, and shortly afterward, her efforts to work as a medium sort of ground to a halt. Two years later,
they left town, moving to a farm in Kansas. They raised thirteen kids and, naturally, life got busy. But she stayed in touch with folks back home as best she could.

  One of the people who wrote her often was Mr. Roff. It’s understandable, really. For a little while, his daughter Mary had come back, and he was attached to Lurancy because of it. And on the rare occasions that she returned to Watseka to visit her parents, she would always make it a point to walk next door and visit the Roffs.

  She would knock, of course. It wasn’t really her home, after all. But they would always welcome her in. I imagine they’d make her a cup of tea and gather together in the sitting room. I have to wonder if Mary’s velvet headdress was still sitting out on the table, and if Lurancy ever felt it looked familiar somehow.

  What we do know is that each time she visited the Roffs, she would do them a favor. After a bit of polite conversation, she would sit back in her chair and close her eyes. The clock on the mantel would tick loudly, almost like footsteps approaching from another room. And then her eyes would open again. But it wouldn’t be Lurancy.

  “Hello, Mother,” she would say to them. “Hello, Father. How are you? It’s so good to be home.”

  THERE ARE A lot of differences between the northern and southern states in America. The cultures are different. Their citizens behave differently. The climate is vastly different. The way things look and feel…just trust me on this, there are big differences. If you spend any time in both regions, you’ll feel those differences, too.

  So it probably wasn’t the smartest idea when Salathiel Stoner married a woman from the South. There was nothing wrong with the act, mind you. And the young couple seemed to love each other. It’s just that it didn’t seem like either of them weighed those differences carefully enough. They stepped blindly into a life of frustration and broken expectations, and nothing good could ever come of that.

  Sal—that’s what his friends called him, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to say than Salathiel, right?—had gone south, according to the legend, to settle his uncle’s estate. I don’t know when or why his uncle had moved to Falls Church, Virginia. All I know is that the Stoners had lived in Maine for generations. Right on the coast, actually, near Brunswick. I can only guess that maybe Sal’s uncle understood those differences, too, and found the South to be a better home for his sensibilities.

  But at the young age of twenty-nine, Sal found himself wrapping up the legal loose ends of his late uncle very far from home. And it was while he was there that he met a beautiful young woman named Amanda Carter. I’m assuming they were madly in love, because things moved fast and they were married before he returned home.

  Maybe, looking back, he had a few regrets about that. I don’t know what Sal Stoner was thinking. I don’t know what his doubts were, or his regrets, or what kept him up late at night. I can only guess. That’s pretty common with history, though; we get stale facts and have to find some humanity hidden among them.

  When Sal brought Amanda home, it was to his cold, strict, austere home overlooking the waters of Dark Harbor. Even the name of the place should have been a clue, but Amanda apparently figured it out on her own. New England, and especially the northern half of Maine, was not the South.

  Maine was cold in the winter. It was dark and stormy most months. The landscape was rocky and harsh and had a way of sucking the cheer out of anything. Modern life might have improved upon that over the years, but in the 1880s, Maine was the polar opposite of Falls Church, Virginia. And Amanda hated it.

  At first, the stories say, she was unhappy. And that unhappiness drove the new couple to bickering. Over time, the arguments grew in scope and volume. They would shout and fight, and then avoid each other for days or weeks. You know that cliché about tension you can cut with a knife? It would have felt right at home in their presence, without a doubt.

  Twenty years. That’s how long this battle between Sal and Amanda went on. I can’t imagine the hurt they caused each other, or the things that were said. I can’t fathom the regret that Sal might have harbored, or the rage that boiled inside of Amanda. In Sal’s mind, he had provided a nice home for an ungrateful woman. To Amanda, it felt like she had been the victim of a bait-and-switch; she’d been promised happiness but had been moved to hell.

  The legend tells us that one of those arguments was about the floor in their parlor. It was, as in so many homes in New England, a vast expanse of beautiful hardwood. And of course Amanda hated it. She wanted carpet. So with her birthday approaching, she asked her husband for the thousandth time if he could buy a rug for the room.

  This time Sal relented. He traveled to Bangor and came home with an enormous red Axminster rug, imported from England. It was expensive, and it had been a pain to transport back to the house. So when he finally got it inside and unrolled it, he was already frustrated enough.

  He retrieved his hammer and a box of tacks, then moved the furniture out of the way to position it properly. He was ready to nail it down when his wife came into the room. She stood over the rug for a moment in silence. Sal probably sat on a chair and watched her, hoping that for once she would be pleased, that she might even smile.

  Instead, Amanda spoke. “I hate it,” she said coldly. “I hate it as much as I hate you.”

  To Sal, that was the final straw. He sprang from his seat and raced toward his wife, hammer raised high above his head. And then he beat her bloody. According to the story, Sal then pulled the rug out from under her, placed it over her still-breathing body, and then began to nail it down around her.

  Amanda, they say, slowly died under that rug over the next few days. Whether she bled to death or suffocated, the details are as foggy as the coast of Maine. But soon enough, she was dead.

  After that, life seemed to return to normal for Sal. It was quiet, there were no more arguments, and he was even seen around town with a smile on his face. But as in all stories of hidden bodies, eventually the truth was uncovered, and so was Amanda’s body.

  Sal was committed to the insane asylum in Portland and died a few years later. But the mark left by his horrible deed never really faded away. The local stories tell of how the Stoner house was sold after his death and a new family moved in. But right away, things were far from normal.

  They would come downstairs in the morning to find that all of the furniture in the parlor had been moved off the rug. At first they assumed someone had broken in during the night, so they began locking their doors and windows, but it didn’t stop. If the stories are to be believed, the new owners also found a large bloodstain in the middle of the big rug there in the parlor. They would clean it as best they could, but the stain would reappear later, just as fresh as before. And then one day they came home to find a lump in the middle of the rug.

  They say the lump was moving. That it was making sounds. The kind of sounds you might expect if someone was alive and trapped beneath it. So, naturally, they pulled the rug up.

  But there was nothing there.

  WHEN DANIEL HOME was born in 1833, his family was already a mess. His parents lived just outside of Edinburgh and had three other children. Four more would follow Daniel, but he would never meet them. At the age of one, he was adopted by an aunt and removed from what everyone perceived to be an abusive home.

  Daniel was a sick child. Mild illnesses would set him back further than most other children. But he did his best to be brave. When he was nine, his aunt and uncle moved to Connecticut in the United States, and they brought Daniel with them.

  There he formed a strong friendship with another boy at school—no one remembers his name, sadly—but the two spent much of their time together. They shared an interest in the supernatural, and they made a pact that, no matter how long it took, when the first of them passed away, he would return and tell the other about it.

  Daniel didn’t grow up in the home of his mother, but he had always been told that she was gifted. Family said she had “the sight,” that she was a seer and fortune-teller. She seemed to be
able to know when a friend or family member had passed away, even if that person lived hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

  So when Daniel had a vision at the age of thirteen that his friend had died, his sadness was tempered by another emotion: pride. He believed he had inherited his mother’s gift. When news came just days later that his friend had indeed passed away, it was all the confirmation he needed.

  Daniel’s mother died in 1849, and when she did, he had the same type of awareness. This time, though, other events followed: knocking could be heard from distant parts of the house. Daniel’s aunt apparently didn’t care for this. She believed all of it—the visions, the premonitions, the knocking—to be the work of the devil. And although she tolerated it for a while, she eventually had enough, and when Daniel was eighteen years old she kicked him out.

  It was shortly after that, at the age of twenty, that Daniel held his first séance, attempting to communicate with the dead while seated at a table with other participants. The results were so impressive, they say, that word of his abilities spread quickly. This was, after all, the era of spiritualism. The amazing Fox sisters had leveraged the supernatural to turn themselves into superstars, traveling the country and performing séances to huge crowds.

  Daniel quickly found himself in high demand. People flocked to see him, and he made predictions and conducted séances for years. Some say he could even heal people, although in the end he was the one who truly needed the healing. The frailty of his youth plagued him even into adulthood, preventing him from pursuing a career in medicine.

  Then in 1852 he was invited to the home of a wealthy silk manufacturer named Ward Cheney. Cheney had a great love of the supernatural, and he saw potential in Daniel. Others were invited, one of whom was Franklin Burr, brother of the editor in chief of the Hartford Daily Times. Unlike Cheney, though, Burr wasn’t there as a believer; he was there to debunk what he perceived to be a fraud.